Complementation, local complementation, and switching in binary matroids

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

In 2004, Ehrenfeucht, Harju, and Rozenberg showed that any graph on a vertex set V can be obtained from a complete graph on V via a sequence of the operations of complementation, switching edges and non-edges at a vertex, and local complementation. The last operation involves taking the complement in the neighbourhood of a vertex. In this paper, we consider natural generalizations of these operations for binary matroids and explore their behaviour. We characterize all binary matroids obtainable from the binary projective geometry of rank r under the operations of complementation and switching. Moreover, we show that not all binary matroids of rank at most r can be obtained from a projective geometry of rank r via a sequence of the three generalized operations. We introduce a fourth operation and show that, with this additional operation, we are able to obtain all binary matroids.